Book: Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Krishna
I understand that this was written as a part of a larger commission to Jules Verne to write five different science travel series for a magazine, almost all of those becoming well known classics (Around the World in 80 Days and 20000 Leagues Under The Sea are two of the most well known books of that series).
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This book also belongs to the group of classics that everybody has heard of and practically most (including me, until now) have not read. As surmised, this is a simply told science fiction story but, when written, was a radical concept. The story is told with humour and keeps your interest throughout, even after all these years!
Axel, the narrator, lives with Professor Otto Liedenbrock and his wife Martha, in Hamburg, Germany. He is well known as an expert in mineralogy and chemistry. Alex was his nephew and orphan and was also the professor’s laboratory assistant.
The professor comes home in a state of excitement, having found an ancient icelandic scroll that he wishes to study. When a small piece of parchment falls out of it, unconnected, he is curious to decipher the runes on it first.
Alex helps the professor (against his will) decipher the script and it says that the ancient prophet has entered through a crater at Sneffels and it had taken him to the centre of the earth. The professor immediately decides to pack his bags and take Alex with him!
The professor, of course, explains why the earth’s core can ‘never be’ molten magma and how the earth’s heat comes from compounds on earth reacting with water.
They go to Denmark. Oh yes, even though the story is in English, they are both German and can speak multiple languages, especially the professor.
They proceed to Iceland (yes, all by boat or horse), which is where the extinct volcano is. Interesting that the author mentions the capital and the biggest city in Iceland as Rejkiavik – a spelling I thought I had misread at first glance but no; that is what he calls it in multiple places.
When this story was written, it seems to you, the sensibilities were very different. The way he mocks Iceland’s way of life, its houses, its cuisine, even its grasslands will grate and provoke a controversy if a book was written in this vein today.
He also talks of poverty, unhygienic conditions, and in one case, a huge head and ragged clothes of some people they saw on their way. ‘The horrible disease of leprosy is too common on that island’ writes Jules Verne. Really!
But apart from all these, there is not much to tell. It is the story of a journey. They reach the bottom of the volcano Snaefell after many days of travel and then go high up to the summit after further hard climb and a couple of small misadventures.
By definition, when they reach the mouth of the volcano and start their descent, there is nothing much to describe by way of the story. It is rich in descriptions and keeps your interest, but then you cannot summarize it without going into details of the rocks they found, the slopes they encountered and so on. The fact that it keeps your interest is a tribute to the narrative powers of Jules Verne.
Alex always is skeptical, the professor is always hopeful. There are further adventures where Alex seems to get separated not only from Hans, the phlegmatic but intrepid guide but also the professor. He cannot even find the stream of water they were following reliably.
Finally, by an acoustic feature in the cave, he manages to connect with the Professor who is still far off, and manages to get rescued – after a separation of two full days with no water and almost no food.
The imagination is uniquely Jules Verne’s. They find a sea in the depths of the earth and cross it by making a raft out of fallen tree branches that they found on the beach. They manage to catch fish in the sea while traveling across it. Fascinating stuff, if unreal. (Yes, I know. That is what stories are. Unreal by their very nature.), They see shadowy monsters who probably lived in the seas on the surface in early life on earth.
They then find that they returned to their starting point. Is the entire thing a waste? No, as they proceed, they come across a fairly well preserved skeleton of a primitive man which seems to upend the then current theory of when humans came on earth.
They see trees, and as they guessed, they find huge animals (Mastodons?) wandering in the forest.
The ending is very unexpected – at least to me, who imagined I had fathomed the kind of book this would be.
For the breathless science fan vein in which this adventure story is told – even if the details are not fully accurate – and the entertainment value of the book, I think I can easily award it 7/10
— Krishna